IP Carrier

One way of interpreting the latest consumer satisfaction rankings from American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) is that, in general, consumer satisfaction with network-delivered services (mobile, fixed) increases as prices drop, and drops as prices are increased.
The caveat is that “price” likely has to be viewed in relationship to value. At least theoretically, consumer satisfaction could remain the same, or climb, if value increases even more than price, on some customer-perceived key dimension.
Xfinity (Comcast) subscription TV satisfaction scores dropped six percent to 58. That is a big change, for any industry and any company over a year’s time, perhaps more notably given the introduction of the voice-activated Xfinity X1 TV interface, which arguably makes it far easier for consumers to find something to watch.
Some might also attribute higher apparent satisfaction with lower prices in the mobile service industry.  
Customer satisfaction with mobile service climbed nearly three…

As a rule, and with the caveat that other points of view exist, I tend to believe that increasing regulation of declining services, industries and products is ultimately pointless, and a waste of time and resources. When it is clear that a product is declining, and being replaced by one or more new substitutes, it just makes sense to allow as graceful a decline as possible.
Since the best outcome is a graceful harvesting of remaining revenues, as demand keeps shifting to the replacement products, it does not make sense to increase, and in some cases, even to maintain, high levels of regulation. Instead, it likely makes sense to allow customers to choose, and suppliers to market, whatever services they want, with less-burdensome overhead, wherever possible.
That would seem to be the case for the U.S. business data services market.  
The business data market has been shifting from legacy SONET/SDH to Ethernet for quite some time. By some estimates, SONET/SDH new hardware sales, for examp…

Some observers might be surprised that 26 percent of surveyed enterprises report they were successful with their internet of things initiatives. That should not come as a surprise.
For decades, success rates for information technology initiatives have generally failed more often than they succeeded. By some estimates, only about nine percent of software development projects at large firms are successful.
The same might be said of change initiatives generally, which some say tend to fail about 75 percent of the time.  
The Cisco study also found that information technology executives were quite a bit more convinced the projects were successful, compared to business executives who were more concerned with business cases.
So far, the Cisco study suggests, IoT initiatives are faring about as well as other information technology initiatives tend to, at larger enterprises.
source: Cisco
source: Cisco

One pesky and important detail we have yet to fully work out is the business model for IoT appliance business models, for consumer appliances.
If you assume a world where nearly every in-home consumer appliance, and probably lots of other stand-alone sensors to track everything from motion to soil moisture to light levels, often on a “stick it on” basis (put a tracking sensor anywhere you want by peeling off the adhesive), and if you assume connectivity has to be provided, the issue is how that connectivity is supplied, and “who” pays for it.
Amazon provides one model, where the appliance supplier pays for connectivity (mobile network) if Wi-Fi is not available, and then uses Wi-Fi as the preferred connection. In that model, connectivity somehow is build into the use of an appliance (does a purchase become a rental?).
Wi-Fi might be an easy choice, as it shifts payment to the owner of the appliance (user pays for the internet access connection). In a few cases perhaps a third party pa…

When observers say the “cost” of supplying telecom services is “too high,” and must be made more affordable, the obvious and direct implication is that somewhere in the supply ecosystem, some participants are going to see a reduction in value and revenue, allowing the final end product--internet access--to be provided to “everyone,” at prices they can afford.
As one example, “open source” network elements already have been developed by the Telecom Infrastructure Project (TIP), a consortium led by Facebook to develop open source transmission products that, in turn, reduce the cost of building and operating transmission networks.
Voyager, a long-haul optical transmission system, already been tested by Facebook and European telecom company Telia over Telia’s thousand-kilometer-telecom network. ADVA Optical Networking is manufacturing the device, which also is being tested by other carriers.
By definition, open source  telecom technology is designed to lower networking costs, which means …

Artificial intelligence is an “exponential” technology that will be harnessed in lots of ways, argues futurist Rohit Talwar. Most of those ways will involve application of AI to develop better insights from mountains of raw data.
Forrester Research, for example predicts that “insights-driven” businesses will represent about $1.2 trillion a year in revenue growth by about 2020, essentially representing market share taken from competitors.
There is another potentially-important angle. Over time, virtually all larger companies--and more people within those companies--will be able to use AI to harvest information in a direct way.
While in 2015 only 51 percent of data and analytics decision-makers said that they were able to easily obtain data and analyze it without the help of technologist, Forrester expects this figure to rise to around 66 percent in 2017.
Some observers think that sort of spreading capability also will eventually lead to something we might call “artificial intelligence a…